> I discovered JSON. I do not claim to have invented JSON because it already existed in nature. What I did was I found it, I named it, I described how it was useful. I don’t claim to be the first person to have discovered it. I know that there are other people who discovered it, at least, a year before I did. The earliest occurrence I found was there was someone at Netscape who was using JavaScript array literals for doing data communication as early as 1996, which was at least 5 years before I stumbled onto the idea.
I can independently confirm that people were using JSON before he named it JSON. I was dumping data in JSON in 2000 for dynamically displayed reports.
But then again I was already used to using Perl data structures as dumped by Data::Dumper for config, because I was taught a lot about Perl by a Lisp programmer who had used Lisp data structures for the same purpose since the 1980s. So using JSON didn't feel original or clever. It seemed like I was simply using a well-known technique in yet another dynamic language.
Then again our reaction to XML was the stupid thing other people were doing that you had to do to interact with the rest of the world. I got used to holding my tongue until I went to Google a decade later and found that my attitude was common wisdom there...
According to Platonism, JSON has no spatiotemporal or causal properties (like a datetime format) and thus has existed and will exist eternally. All hail JSON.
